On May 5, the day before Barack Obama all but clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, I visited Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., because I was sick—sick of stories about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his most famous parishioner and of television close-ups of Obama drinking beer and Hillary Clinton belting straight shots in efforts to show their inner blue collars.

We are letting religious fanaticism dominate the presidential campaign. The candidates have brought it on themselves with tedious references to their churchgoing piety. Now we’re all paying for it. Who cares what their preachers say?

When looking at Sen. Barack Obama’s primary election results, I always check the white vote first. I imagine many Democratic National Convention superdelegates do, too. The reason is obvious: Obama is the first African-American with a strong chance of winning the presidency, and his prospects depend on whether whites will give him a vote.

Journalists are famous for their dogged drive to “get the story.” But when it comes to situations like Wednesday’s campaign debate in Philadelphia, they have the ability to make stories, too—and the story ABC’s pundits created that night buried the most important issues of the day, at Americans’ expense.

Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s congressional check-in about Iraq this week didn’t offer much hope for America’s overseas entanglements, and as coverage of the overseas wars wanes, the media isn’t holding politicians’ feet to the fire—or telling the real story about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bill Boyarsky, political correspondent for Truthdig, is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. Boyarsky was city editor of The Los Angeles Times when he retired in 2001. Before that, he was a columnist, city-county bureau chief and political writer. He was a member of reporting teams that won three Pulitzer prizes and has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2010, the Los Angeles Press Club honored Boyarsky’s original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year.

Boyarsky has also taught at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, California State University at Northridge and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He was given a fellowship at Berkeley for research on his biography of the late California political leader Jesse M. Unruh, “Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics” (November 2007). He served as Vice President of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission (2003 - 2008).

Boyarsky’s latest book is “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times” (September 2009). He is the author of four other books: “The Rise of Ronald Reagan”; “Ronald Reagan, His Life and Rise to the Presidency”; “Los Angeles: City of Dreams”; and “Backroom Politics.” His wife, Nancy, was co-author of Backroom Politics.

Boyarsky is a columnist for the Jewish Journal and blogs for LA Observed.